Google today pushed a small update to its Chrome mobile browser in the App Store. The new edition, officially bumped to version number 46.0.2490.73, brings support for iOS 9’s new Split View multitasking mode on the iPad Air 2, iPad mini 4 and iPad Pro.

Moreover, Slide Over multitasking view and Picture-in-Picture video mode are supported in this Chrome edition as well. These are certainly welcomed additions for those of you who do a lot of research online as you can now browse the web with Chrome and run another app like Notes side-by-side.

This edition of Chrome also sports improved handling of right-to-left languages. Aside from these improvements, no other changes are mentioned in Chrome’s release notes.

Chrome is ditching its own notification center

And if Chrome for Mac is your daily driver, you may be delighted to learn the app will be ditching its built-in notification center that sits in your Mac’s menu bar, so there’s that.

“In some cases, these desktop notifications would appear while users were gone, so in 2013 Chrome launched the notification center, a place for users to find notifications from Chrome apps and extensions that they’d missed,” explains the firm in a blog post.

“However, in practice, few users visit the notification center,” the post adds.

“To keep Chrome simple, it will be removed from Windows, Mac, and Linux in the upcoming release.”

To disable Chrome’s notification center on your Mac, do the following:

Step 1: Open Chrome.

Step 2: In the upper right corner of the browser window, click the Chrome menu.

Step 3: Click Settings > Show advanced settings.

Step 4: In the Privacy section, click Content settings.

In the dialog that appears, go to Notifications and choose one of the following:

Allow all sites to show notifications: You’ll automatically see notifications from all websites.

Ask when a site wants to show notifications: You’ll get an alert from Chrome whenever a site wants to show you notifications. This is the default setting.

Do not allow any site to show notifications: You won’t see any notifications from websites.

The notification center on Chrome OS will remain unchanged.

Developers will need to adapt their web apps as notifications sent solely to Chrome’s built-in notification center will now result in an error. All other notifications will continue to work without requiring any changes.

Adding a notification centre actually wasn’t a bad idea for operating systems that didn’t naively support notifications. These days though OS X, Windows 10 and the various variants of Linux all have built in support for notifications. Chrome should take advantage of this rather than implementing their own notification centre.

Charles222

The chrome notification system is gone in version 47, actually.

John

If you have a Jailbroken iPad with iOS 9, install the tweak “Medusa” from the BigBoss repo. With that i can use the Split View feature on my iPad mini 2. And works really well!